


Leonov's Legacy

by Wecanhaveallthree



Category: Warhammer 40.000
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-19
Updated: 2019-11-19
Packaged: 2021-02-13 02:04:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,364
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21486529
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Wecanhaveallthree/pseuds/Wecanhaveallthree
Summary: A glimpse at the dark moments between the revelation of Lorgar's betrayal and Thiel's daring rescue.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 16





	Leonov's Legacy

**Author's Note:**

> 'The first person to go on a spacewalk was Alexei Leonov. He was from Russia. The first spacewalk was on March 18, 1965. It was 10 minutes long.'

_Let the galaxy burn._

The words have a weight to them, a solemnity. They are not the speech of barbs and taunts flung between bloodied brothers. Prophecy rings them like black bells, unsinging the universe, taking it apart toll by toll, stitch by stitch. All that is right and proper cannot survive those words. The speaker cannot be immune.

But the shadows that flood behind the Aurelians eyes: he knows.

He knows and welcomes it.

For a fraction of a second, Guilliman believes that his brother is fleeing, growing smaller, shrinking, some other trick or mystique. The impossibility of it, matched by the poisoned bile on his tongue -- those hateful words boiling up from his hearts, a place the Primarch did not suspect he had until this moment -- stills the churn of practical and theoretical.

Then the slicing pain of shattered crystalflex shards robs him of even those thoughts.

The bridge of the _Macragge’s Honour_ is disintegrating around him. He can feel the grave chill of the vacuum hungering at his back, the inexorable pull and push of unequalised pressure. The halo of instruments, metal, blood and bodies expanding like a supernova.

He is a creature of ancient science married to indomitable will. Few forces exist in this world that can move a Primarch except by his consent.

He can no more resist the expulsion than a babe can cling to a mother’s breast.

Visions of starlight caper across his vision. Falling stars. Shooting stars. An orrery of destruction over Calth. Capital ships vent their betrayal and fury on one another. Their escorts cling to their skirts like distressed children, peeking out to offer their own volleys of macro-cannons and missiles to the orbital violence.

They burn up in great waves, like chains of fire across the skyline. Link by link. Step by step. Formations are sundered and scattered, or go down together - it matters not.

Their bravery means nothing to knives in the dark.

While those flames spring up from hulls like carelessly scattered rubies, Guilliman freezes. There are microfilament punctures in his wargear. He spills oxygen and vital fluids like a pierced bladder. He clings to the _Honour’s_ broken bridge, the jagged edges all that prevent his descent into Calth orbit, a blue-shifted meteor to grace the skyline.

He has no breath to give voice to the agony. The void is in him, hungry, consuming, working against the miracles of gene-forging that compose his body. He can feel the blood vessels burst beneath his skin. The sluggishness of his thoughts as synapses misfire.

Bizarrely, he is reminded of a cogitator spooling down. Do those slack-jawed, drooling things worry when they cease?

Will that be the end, even if he can be recovered? The Primarch-servitor, the crippled meat of him serving as some biological computer for processing vast quantities of information?

And would that be so different from the life he has lived? Tallying, marking, grading? Simply a processor of data, unable to make sense of it? Unable to see the implicit threat, the precondition of malice? Has he doomed Calth by his unoriginality of thought, his dependence on having all the information and seeing nothing of its truth?

A fool, a fool, thrice a fool.

He clings to calm as tightly as he does the spar of twisted metal. His twin grips are slipping.

_Theoretical,_ thunders a voice that could be his own, _In low orbit there is a sleeve of rarified oxygen about the Honour._

_Practical, this is survivable._

_Practical, I am still in this fight._

It takes the strength of a near-god to wrench himself from the bleeding edge and activate the mag-locking of his boots. He rights himself with an inaudible groan. The fantastic star-view steadies, and immediately he can begin to make out battle-groups and movements. He can extrapolate the positions and their stellar likenesses.

The knowledge of the battle above is not as comforting as that of functionality restored. How could life be, if he were ravaged, damaged, his faculties corrupted?

Blood-spattered and howling. Black-cowled and grinning.

He does not need to imagine when such obvious examples are on hand for the fate of a Primarch whose mind or body has failed. He counts true madmen in his family. Perhaps, now, one more to add to that unenviable list.

_Horus is rising._

Perhaps more than one.

Guilliman lifts his head, ignoring the starvation in his muscles, the cold-cramps, the cost of every movement on the skin of his flagship. He looks at the continental smoke-storms that shroud the world above. He posits the deployments that are taking place even now, their numbers, their operational strength, their casualty figures.

He can see it too clearly. Calth is a spark in dry tinder. Calth is a world on fire.

Burning. The daggers of the Word Bearers are the flint.

Yearning. The conflagration wants to be born, wants to be so much more.

He will not allow it. He clenches fists that crackle with frost. He will _not_ allow it. He is master of this realm. Not the jaded, jagged, jealous Aurelian. Not the smiling wolf.

There is a lesson that they have not learned at behest of men like Konor. You may wound the shar-bear, you may trace and track it through the wilds and take your sport. But you do not botch the kill. You slay it on the first shot. You do let the beast live to limp away. You do not seek to contend with the bear in its caves, in front of its cubs.

Guilliman does not resemble something so base as a mere, material beast.

Each step on the _Macragge’s Honour_ is a titan-weight. It is the step of colossi, astride their dominion. It is the application of basic theoretical to simple practical.

The first of laws.

Momentum.

This is how the Primarch greets the first of the kill-team making their daring landing on his ship - his ship! The dull crimson of their armour, the spurting of their remodelled jump packs, the hooked axes in their hands. The Ashen Circle. Paragons of the Imperial Heralds. Shock troopers of the new Bearers of the Word.

Guilliman crests the short horizon like a runaway grav-train. The Marine can no more stop him than he could push the _Honour_ out of orbit.

He had locked his boots to the hull when he landed. This was a mistake he did not live long to regret. The tensile strength of ceramite, particularly that of warriors expecting to make hard landings, is enormous. It is artificer-grade.

It tears like skin as the Primarch bulls through the Word Bearer. It leaves his legs from the thighs down attached, ludicrously, to the ship.

He hefts his axe. Guilliman catches his arm. And pulls. It, too, comes away with something approaching ease. The Marine’s last sight is of the Primarch’s features, contorted in rage, his mouth working. His words go unheard: whatever demand, insult, plea, Roboute Guilliman has spoken will never be known, not even to himself when he examines the events with time and distance.

The Primarch will remember soundless hours, a blur of moments spread across a chequerboard of consciousness. He will remember the killing. The taste of it. The bitterness of it, like an apple’s core, on his lips. The vague shame of control lost.

He will remember the simplicity of that time, walking the _Honour_ like a golem, pulling the sons of his brother apart like poorly-made toys. Casting them into the void, or to far-off Calth, or crushing them into the deck.

And when Thiel appears, when the red-marked wipes away that smear of insanity and presents a practical advance - the Primarch almost refuses.

Almost.

So in ten thousand years, when the Primarch Reborn stands at the helm of the Indomitus Crusade, when he closes his eyes briefly -- though he needs no sleep, no rest -- imagine what he is seeing.

Humanity united as one? The horrors of deprivation and scarcity a thing of the past? The ultimate defeat of Chaos?

Or the pitted hull of _Macragge’s Honour_, and the thought of his hands tight around Lorgar's throat?

Imagine, but do not ask.

He does not know the answer.


End file.
